Thermaltake Contac 29 Direct Touch CPU Cooler Review

Test Results

I mentioned the test methodology on the previous page but I’ll quickly cover it again for those of you who skip straight to the results. The CPU was run at 4GHz with 1.35vcore, 1.30vtt, and 1.65vdimm. The memory was run at DDR3-2000C7 with the IMC at 4GHz. Loading was performed by executing individual threads of Super Pi 32M with the temperature measurement occurring after 5 minutes of testing.

The first thing that struck me was the vast delta between the IHS temperatures and the core temperatures. At idle it could be as low as 15 degrees but under heavy loads it could exceed 40 degrees. The graphs also show precisely how worthless the stock Intel heatsink is for overclocking. The two mid-range heatsinks were rather close through all the testing with the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus running slightly cooler through the majority of the tests. I figure the 50% fan speed tests were most important as they show a nice compromise between noise and performance. For the IHS testing the Thermaltake Contac 29 ran just ever so slightly warmer with the delta between the two heatsinks at under a degree through all the tests. For the Core Temp results the delta was a bit larger at 2 degrees except for the 8 thread test where the limits of the thermal diode killed the accuracy of the readings.